The Cost of Lunch, Etc.: A Review in Swans Commentary

A Writer On Her Own Path

Many of Marge Piercy’s readers have been following her assorted writings
across the span of their adult lives. We were young with her in the
later 1960s and have snapped up, poked through, or otherwise taken note
of her volumes ever since. So the notion that this new volume is a
“debut collection” strikes an odd note. Then again, novelist and poet
Piercy has not been doing much in the short-story vein all these
decades. At points, The Cost of Lunch more than makes up for the lapse.

This
is a tough book, not by sentence structure or fancy words, but “tough”
in the sense that her protagonists yield no ground, reject men after
awhile, and deal sharply with women who are hopelessly male-oriented.
Piercy’s favorite women are Piercy Women. And they are unforgiving.

Taking
the last title as more than metaphor, How to Seduce A Feminist (or
Not), we learn that strong-minded women like sex well enough, and
intellectual company too, but what sets their nerves on end is the
assumptions that men make almost constantly. They assume women are ready
for a relationship — at least a one-nighter — on a moment’s notice
and men’s terms, they assume women are actually interested in hearing
what they have to say, and they assume that politically, mentally, and
so on, women are just about the same as each other. Big mistakes.

This
story unnerves me slightly because the would-be seducer has an academic
job in Madison, Wisconsin. Did I see him on the streets or in a coffee
shop? He has the hots for our Chicagoan.

He’s cute, he seems to
have become a literary success — as if this were a turn-on — and he
had some kind of relationship with the feminist of the title in the high
days of The Movement (suddenly, that sounds like a long time ago). Now
she wants him out of the apartment and out of her life. Actually, How to
Seduce has several other shorter vignettes and one even turns out as
happily as any in this book, “she is happy she met him,” because he is
the rare considerate type. This would mark the fellow in question a
happy exception.

Marge Piercy is so good at exploring details,
whether apartments, relatives, or friends and sex partners, that such
generalizations are risky. We turn from stories set in Chicago in 1960
or 1970 to the Boston area decades later, marking Piercy’s own
locations. Some are political only in the once-familiar sense that the
Personal Is Political. Others are deeply political in the old way, young
men in the later 1960s on the run from Selective Service, needing all
the assistance they can get, at risk to whoever helps them. All the
protagonists are women, and the careful reader will discover that as
much as they differ, nearly all have a bit of Marge in them and many
quite a bit more.

I am inclined toward the protagonist
fiction-writer or poet because, after all, this is as close to Marge as
we are going to get in fiction. Her writers seem to enjoy the work,
being alone at the tasks of inventing characters and scenes, giving
readings, and life is easier when they acquire the self-confidence to
become their successful selves, mining personal experience along with
memories and social and environmental observations for material and
insights. It never becomes clear that company, the company of a man, the
involvements of family or any others, are quite so welcome. Now and
then a touch of Jewish continuity sneaks in, providing a different kind
of continuity; now and then a political moment reminds us of past
engagements, but mostly is a writer on her own path, making new
discoveries, inviting us to join her.